Sustainable Cultivated Land Use and Management

Research into land use and agricultural production in China has revealed a number of important insights:

• Human activities play a major role in creating suitable environments for crop production.
• Agricultural machinery services (AMS) have a significantly positive impact on cultivated land productivity.
• Cultivated land area in China has decreased continuously from 1996 to 2019.
• A new model for measuring arable land fragmentation takes into account terrain slope and road network.
• Maize, rice, and soybean are the three major crops in Wangkui County, with continuous maize cultivation being the dominant cropping pattern.
• The vulnerability of the farmland system in Sanmenxia City has decreased over a period of 17 years.
• An improved area-weighted calculation method of the eco-environmental quality index (EQI) was used to analyze the eco-environmental effects.
• A method for identifying fragmented cropland based on scale transformation was proposed.
• Budget expenditure for rural development, local retail sales, average earnings of local farmers, competition of external vegetable supply and consumption demand were found to be drivers of Greenhouse-led cultivated land (GCL).
• A spatio-temporal statistical combination method was used to explore land use transition in Baiyun District.

These findings provide valuable information for understanding land use and agricultural production in China, and could help to inform future policies and practices.